ניירות דיון 2026

WP 1-2026 Estimating the Impact of Loan Supply Shocks. Nittai K. Bergman, Alejandro Casado, Rajkamal Iyer, and Itay Saporta-Eksten

Using a simple model of firm borrowing with standard ingredients, we show that commonly used empirical approaches in the literature do not recover the impact of credit supply shocks on loan-level lending, on total firm-level borrowing or on real outcomes. We propose new estimators that recover these effects.

We apply our methodology to the 2011 credit crisis in Spain and show that it implies significantly smaller effects of loan supply shocks than those generated by current empirical approaches.

WP 2-2026 The Anatomy of Amplification: A Frisch-System Approach to Shock Transmission. Marlon Azinovic-Yang, Nir Jaimovich, Itay Saporta-Eksten, Yaniv Yedid-Levi

Elasticities governing consumption and labor choices are central to macroeconomic shock transmission, with existing work emphasizing the intertemporal elasticity of substitution
and the Frisch labor-supply elasticity. We highlight the role of a third object: the Frisch consumption-wage elasticity, which captures consumption-labor complementarity. Embedding a nonparametric Frisch demand system in a New Keynesian model, we map these three micro elasticities to aggregate dynamics, clarifying how each elasticity shapes the amplification of monetary, fiscal, markup, and productivity shocks and why consumption-labor complementarity can matter more than Frisch labor-supply elasticity. Quantitatively, in representative-agent and heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian models, we show that consumption-labor complementarity is a dominant amplification channel, often generating responses an order of magnitude larger than those induced by varying the Frisch labor-supply elasticity. These results underscore the value of a framework that allows macroeconomic models to match micro estimates of consumption-labor complementarity, a key determinant of shock amplification

WP 3-2026 Concentrated Risk: Misallocation and Granular Business Cycles. Tomer Ifergane

When firm-level shocks affect aggregate outcomes, distortions reshaping the firm-size distribution affect not only output but also aggregate volatility. The sign depends on the correlation between distortions and productivity: compressing high-productivity firms reduces concentration and volatility, while compressing low-productivity firms raises both. In a U.S. calibration, positively correlated distortions reduce aggregate volatility resulting. From firm-level shocks by 42 percent relative to a zero-distortion benchmark. Normatively, dispersion in marginal products need not imply
inefficiency. Rather, in a granular economy, the risk-averse planner optimally diversifies production away from high-productivity firms, incurring an output loss in exchange for reduced aggregate risk.

WP 4-2026 Job Search Assistance for Older Unemployed in the Digital Era: Evidence from a Large Scale RCT. Ari Kutai, Itay Saporta-Eksten, and Analia Schlosser.  

Digital hiring tools challenge older workers accustomed to traditional job search methods. Using a large-scale RCT, we evaluate a job search training program for high-skilled older unemployed individuals focused on the use of online platforms and social networks. The program increased earnings and job stability for men, especially in jobs requiring complex matching, suggesting improved match quality, but had no positive impact on women’s earnings. Gender differences cannot be explained by observable characteristics or differential compliance but appear to derive from treated women’s increased reservation wages and lower returns to online search tools.

WP 5-2026   Pension Fund Asset Allocation, Household Investments and Capital Market Depth Ulf Nielsson, Oliver-Alexander Press, Jesper Rangvid, Ofer Setty.

The global shift towards defined contribution pension schemes significantly increases households’ exposure to equity markets through their pension savings. Does this shift influence households’ non-pension investment choices, and if so, why? Investigating a pension fund reform and using multiple identification strategies, we show that households increase their non-pension equity holdings following an increase in the equity exposure of their pension fund, thereby contributing to deeper capital markets. We interpret our results within the framework of a simple model, illustrating how equity exposure via pension savings can lower barriers to stock market participation for nonpension investments.

WP 6-2026 Heads Up: Does Air Pollution Cause Workplace Accidents? Victor Lavy, Genia Rachkovski, Omry Yoresh. 

Literature has shown that air pollution can have short- and long-term adverse effects on physiological and cognitive performance. In this study, we estimate the effect of increased pollution levels on the likelihood of accidents in construction sites, a significant factor related to productivity losses in the labor market. Using data from all construction sites and pollution monitoring stations in Israel, we find a strong and significant causal effect of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), one of the primary air pollutants, on construction site accidents. We find that a 10-ppb increase in NO2 levels increases the likelihood of an accident by as much as 25 percent. Importantly, our findings suggest that these effects are non-linear. While moderate pollution levels, according to EPA standards, compared to clean air levels, increase the likelihood of accidents by 138 percent, unhealthy levels increase it by 377 percent. We present a mechanism where the effect of pollution is exacerbated in conditions with high cognitive strain or reduced awareness. Finally, we perform a cost-benefit analysis, supported by a nonparametric estimation calculating the implied number of accidents due to NO2 exposure, and examining a potential welfare-improving policy to subsidize the closure of construction sites on highly polluted days.

WP 7-2026  A Robust Wisdom of the Crowd Daniel Fershtman

This paper studies a model of outcome-based observational learning where a sequence of agents each choose among risky actions (e.g., which technological
innovation to adopt), the outcome of which is a function of an unknown state. Agents observe past choices and outcomes, but are short-lived and do not internalize the informational value of their actions. The main result is a “robust wisdom of the crowd”: a characterization of the set of information structures under which agents, without any intervention, all choose the socially optimal action, at any history, for any number of agents, and any prior. The results also shed light on the regulation of online artificial intelligence-based recommendation platforms.

WP 8-2026 Frictions in News Consumption: Evidence from Social Media Luca Braghieri, Ro’ee Levy, and Hannah Trachtman

We study the drivers of like-minded and low-reliability news-following on social media, and the effectiveness of interventions targeting them. In a five-week field experiment with more than 3,000 U.S. Facebook users, we document the passive nature of participants’ news portfolio formation process and the role of behavioral frictions. The experiment varies whether participants are prompted to re-optimize the portfolio of news pages they follow on Facebook through a user-friendly platform-integrated interface, and whether they receive personalized information about outlet slant and reliability. In contrast to canonical models of news consumption, we find that the re-optimization interface induces large portfolio changes even without new information, while information alone has no effect unless paired with re-optimization. Our interventions produce two main effects: they reduce the slant and increase the reliability of users’ portfolios, thus potentially mitigating negative externalities for democracy, and they move users’ portfolios closer to their stated preferences, mitigating internalities.

WP 9-2026  Article-Level Slant and Polarization of News Consumption on Social Media Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Ro’ee Levy, Markus Mobius, Jacob Steinhardt, and Ruiqi Zhong

We fine-tune a large language model on expert ratings to construct a content-based, articlelevel measure of news slant, applied to the near universe of articles (∼1 million) published online by the top ∼ 100 U.S. outlets in 2019. 70% of the variation in slant occurs within rather than across outlets, leaving wide scope for within-outlet ideological selection. Consistent with this, polarization in news consumption on Facebook—the gap in average slant between articles Republicans and Democrats consume—equals 89% of the distance between the average New York Times and Fox News article and is 53% larger than outlet-level measures imply.

WP 10-2026 Deterrence of Unwanted Behavior: a Theoretical and Experimental Investigation  Penélope Hernández, Zvika Neeman, Ro’i Zultan

We study whether arbitrary differentiation of enforcement, in the sense of raising sanction probabilities in some areas or times while lowering them elsewhere, reduces socially undesirable behavior. Such differentiation can be achieved by concentrating resources or by Bayesian persuasion. Our theoretical model and a laboratory experiment show that whether splitting a uniform sanction probability p into a higher pH and a lower pL can decrease overall violations is closely related to the prevalent level of violation. Arbitrary differentiation is socially beneficial in environments with a high temptation to violate and socially detrimental if environments with low temptation.